Episode Highlights

The episode starts slowly with a look back at how the Mahou Shoujo Ikusei Keikaku game was played and at the sexy-magical-girl-transformation of Snow White. After a brief monologue on how happy she was when she started off her Magical Girl career, Snow White is seen crying her eyes out in her room and reminiscing about her dead/soon-to-be-dead colleagues. This goes on for a while and is a typically uninteresting way of wasting air time. She keeps sulking and informs FAV that she is not planning to transform anymore. FAV, being a control freak douche, gets obviously upset, and finally blurts out how everything works:

The so called ‘World of Magic’ scouts for new Magical Girls by assigning a familiar (in our case, the floating abomination known as FAV) to a Master (Cranberry), and together they oversee exams using a method of their choice (having the candidates slaughter each other) to choose new Magical Girls.

FAV then proceeds to explain that he is planning to kill Swim Swim and Ripple because they are both mentally unstable (you don’t say) and keep Snow White as his Master. Snow White gets pissed off and jumps out of the window to join the fun, after breaking her Magical Smartphone.

In the meantime, Ripple meets Swim Swim at the local dam wearing Top Speed’s cape. The battle, I have to say, is a bit dull. Ripple obviously ignores FAV’s advice and tries to attack Swim Swim conventionally (WHY) and ends up losing her hand and eye. Yet, by eventually using a light bomb she kills that obsessive and crazy kindergartener, then dies from excessive bleeding. Snow White finds them dead and is not impressed, so she tries to destroy the Master Magical Smartphone Swim Swim was carrying, and apparently, FAV’s source of existence. She dramatically fails and ends up with a bloody knuckle. While FAV is being horrible, Hardgore Alice’s lucky rabbit foot thing starts glowing and Ripple comes back to life, grabs Swim Swim’s Magical-Blade-thing and destroys FAV. THE WORLD REJOICES.

The episode ends with Snow White and Ripple being renegades and acting outside the margins of the world of the World of Magic… by helping people. They regularly spar in order for Snow White to finally learn how to fight and stop being so useless. We get to see them holding hands, and realize that the hand she has been holding all along in the show’s intro was actually Ripple’s and not La Pucelle’s.

That’s all folks.

Themes & Trivia

The protagonist against the system: Snow White is not the only anime character to embrace anarchy and go off acting on her own. In fact, most of them do: if you look at the three most popular anime of all time, which would probably be Fullmetal Alchemist, Code Geass, and Death Note, all of the protagonists are independent renegades who act alone and represent their own values rather than those imposed to them.

Final Episode Structure: Flashback, epic final struggle, despair and retribution. Always in that particular order.

Eye Scar: Ripple just joined the ‘scarred eye’ anime group of characters. A tradition that can be traced back to the 80s.

Comments

The ending to the show was rather mediocre. I was expecting a much more dramatic battle but I think that so far the best had been La Pucelle vs Cranberry. I am happy to see that Ripple survived and decided to stop clicking her tongue; vast improvement. But I think I liked Episode 11 better.

The End

At least FAV dies.

Tune in for the Winter 2017 season anime reviews coming in MANGA.TOKYO in January, and don’t forget to check our brand new Winter 2017 Anime Info Page!